Are You Mission Critical?

But now our industry is in a profound transition away from linear tape and film, away from the comforts of known risks and techniques. Now we enter the fearful and exciting rainforest of computer-based, digital production. What are the risks? How can we prepare for them? Who will guide us?

Example. It's 9:00 Friday night and you're rapping up a job for delivery on Monday morning, let's say you're rendering a nonlinear edit. Just when you're ready to pour yourself a congratulatory, done-ahead-of deadline drink, the computer crashes. When you go to reboot, it won't even enter the operating system. You look inside to see if maybe a drive cable fell off and when restart, you don't even get power! Then you're client calls and says, "Bla-bla-bla, and I'd like to move the deadline up to Sunday morning."

Would you:

A. Tell your client that it is unlikely you will have anything for him Sunday, maybe not even Monday morning.
B. Tell your client you have a glitch, and that your weekend staff engineers will iron it out and most likely you'll deliver as requested.
C. Tell the client there's no problem, hang up and rely on someone's Mission Critical Technical support to get you out of the mess.

If you answered, "A," you don't rely on video production as a livelihood. Don't give up your day job.

Answered B? You are a large, highly profitable facility with a dedicated computer-literate engineering staff. You are played by Sylvester Stallone at a theater near you.

But if you answered C, you are a small, "project studio" practitioner working with an extraordinary hardware supplier. The supplier knows that the tool he supplies must be redundant and is prepared to replace or fix it for you at any cost.

In the videotape world, you could call companies like Sony and Chyron for this kind of service. Their round-the-clock technical support saved many of our sizzling hides. But Sony Broadcast and Chyron don't speak Windows NT and SCSI and RISC (yet). Are you out in the cold, burning clients to stay alive? Or is there a computer manufacturer who understands the concept of Mission Critical in terms of project-studio production?

On Friday night, October (DATE), I left Alex Pantelias, our staff editor, wrapping up a long nonlinear editing project that was two and a half screen widths from being ready to final render. Everything looked fine, so I headed out to a formal dinner affair, light hearted and happy that the week was over.

After the dinner, I decided to drop by the office with some of my dinner companions to show off the shop. When I arrived, there was a note on the door from Alex. "Premier crashed during render. Went to reboot but the computer can't find the boot drive. Have to play to a band gig, can't stay. Can work tomorrow. Call me."

My friends were not computer savvy, but they could read in the expression on my face that the party was over. I said, "Hold on. Sometimes its a small bug and we can get it back in a minute." Fifteen minutes later, my bow tie was undone and the wing color wilted with sweat. "You have that video game demon look on your face," my friend said, but I didn't hear. "Looks like a big bug," said another as they put on their coats and prepared to leave. Good friends. I never noticed they were gone until a half hour later when I threw my hands up in disgust and admitted I was beat. Not only couldn't I get the computer to recognize the boot drive, suddenly, I couldn't even get the computer to switch on. (See, you can properly end a sentence with a preposition.)

No kidding. I was in a panic. The deadline really had been moved up to Sunday morning, we had a six hour render to do, the computer with all the files was stone cold dead and it was, we're counting down the hours now, 9:30 PM on a Friday night.

I phoned Aggie Frizzel, the PR Director at Intergraph, who originally authorized the loaner machine, a TDZ-610 quad Pentium with a gazillion meg of RAM. Her civilization destroyer said that she'd be on vacation until Tuesday, but that she could be beeped in an emergency. Yeah, I beeped her. While I waited, I also called Mad Max, the guy who actually ships the loaners. Max is legendary at Intergraph as a kind of Milo Minderbinder of eval equipment. He knows a lot of handy stuff. He was out too, but also had a beeper.

Within three minutes, Max was on the phone, calling from a party, trying to diagnose my problem and he agreed with me that it looked like a dead power supply and the worse news was that a TD-610 didn't have your K-Mart power supply as standard equipment. What do I do now? "We call tech support, of course." he said.

"Yeah, like what, on Monday morning, Max? This is like, what? What do you call it in engineering terms. You guys are engineers, right?"

"How about Mission Critical?" he suggested.

"Yeah that's the ticket. Let's call this Mission Critical." And I explained to him about the Sunday morning deadline.

"So," he replied, "You can call our tech support anytime, 24 hours a day, every day. And if you tell him it's a mission critical, they'll respond accordingly."

I was too desperate to be sarcastic enough to say, "Yeah, sure." I asked for the number, but Max said that he'd have to get me a special PIN number that bona-fide owners get with their machines. Max then did the commercial.

"Keep in mind now, as we go through this, that you are going to get exactly the same technical support you would get if you were a user and not a press person."

No, I thought, I want the press person service, stupid! But I said, "That's great. When will they call?"

"In a minute."

In a minute the tech people were on the line. (I was getting the press person support.) I explained my problem and get this, he said that Intergraph had a local repair site in White Plains, NY, just 35 minutes drive from my office. I was told to sit tight and that the local tech guy would call me in ten minutes or less. Neat. I couldn't resist. "This is great service even for a press person." I said.

"What's a press person?" He asked. I didn't quibble.

Then Aggie called me from her vacation in _________. I told her we were getting good tech support and she said I should call her anyway it went when the tech people were through. She gave me the number of her hotel room.

In eight minutes flat, __________, the local tech guy, asked me, "What's a press person? Are you using a 610, like for running a dry cleaning business or something?" Boy, when these guys pretend, they do it with a sense of humor.

"Where are you exactly?" I asked.

"At home. I got the page and I'm ready to come to the city if you need it. Trouble is, I don't have the power supply for a 610 here, or in the shop. I checked the computer before calling you. (That's why it took me so long.) And the nearest one is in our local office in North Jersey. If it really is your power supply, I'll drive there, pick it up and bring it to you by say - " We looked at our watches. It was freaking 9:48 PM! I had been in Intergraph mission critical emergency state only 18 minutes and a guy was already offering to drive 60 miles for me on a Friday night.

Before he went for the car keys, however NAME1 suggested we do a quick diagnostic over the phone. Step by step, we started to make sure that I had a bad power supply. During the process, I remarked how hard it had been to figure out how to slide off the top panel of the computer.

"You have the top off?" He screamed, "It has an interlock switch that cuts the power so you don't electrocute yourself."

Neat. Asian computers don't have interlocks. Intergraphs are made in the USA. They worry about domestic violence of the tort kind.

I slid the top back on and presto, I had a running computer that wouldn't recognize the boot drive. After some more diagnostics, NAME1 was pretty sure the system drive had crashed. I agreed and luckily, I had another drive, a 9 gigabyte Elite. NAME1 waited patiently while I wired it it, installed Windows NT and got the system up and running.

Now we had to get the AVIs and other essential data off the dead drive so as to eliminate the need to spend another week re-editing the program that had to be delivered Sunday morning.

"Well, now that's WindowsNT software expertise," said NAME1, "And for that, let's get you the best WindowsNT guy in Intergraph, ________."

"Where's ________?"

"In Huntsville. Home in bed, probably. But we'll wake him up and see if he wants to take care of you."

"Wow. Thanks."

"You said it was mission critical, right?"

I confirmed that it was. "Some real important guy wants his tux cleaned for a dance?" He joked. By now, NAME1 knew he was going to be the subject of a Videography article. I was already sufficiently impressed with Intergraph technical support.

Before NAME2 called, I got check up calls from Aggie, Max and the guy who answered the first technical support call. They were all making sure that my problem was being handled. This was press person support.

Twenty minutes later, I got a call from NAME2. First he apologized for the delay, but he'd decided to go into the office where he just happened to have an identical TDZ-610 and could copy my procedures step-by-step.

"I'm sorry I had to get you out of bed." I said.

"'S okay." he replied, stifling a yawn, "I'm on call all weekend anyway." On call?

"You guys like Doctors, or something?"

"Well, our computers are in a lot of medical centers, so we have to be on call like doctors."

I'd like to report that my work with NAME2 was short and sweet. It wasn't. NAME2 and I spent the whole night on the phone together. Eventually, we found a way to get the dead drive to yield its booty and finally Premier was reloaded with the program and I started to render. And then Premier went down the tubes and crashed the render!

Bemoaning the fact that Adobe, good as it was, didn't have technical support on Saturdays, NAME2 started me on a quick diagnosis of what he did know about Premier.

"Wait now," I cautioned him, "This is not an Intergraph issue. We put the Premier and the DPS Perception card into your computer."

"I know," NAME2 said, "But hell, I don't have to get my kid to the ball game until eleven and I'm not going to risk sleeping through the alarm."

I know I'm way past the point where any New Yorker will believe this story, but I swear for what it's worth on anything you like to see me lose that all of this is true. Perhaps your credibility will rise if I tell you that NAME2 had very little to add that was of help with the Premier issue. Maybe you'll believe me if I tell you that even until 2AM on Sunday morning I still did not have the edit completed for the client. But all of that was due to problems far beyond Intergraph's responsibilities and the purpose of this article, which if I didn't forget, was to illustrate the degree of mission criticality that producers expect and require from a supplier that wants to be considered "ready for primetime."

Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. You're thinking you'll discount this whole story because I got special press person treatment. Okay. Let's take that into account. Let's say Max was at a party with the President of Ingergraph and that they downed their gin fizzies and said, "Let's impress the pants off the Videography guy." And if you think that's what happened in real life, I say this. How many companies do you know who culd do what Intergraph did, even if the company president decided he wanted to do it. Think about this.

You're the President of XYZ manufacturing and you call your tech support guy and say, "Hey, let's pull one over on Videography tonight." Or you do a Major Barbara and say, "I'll fire your ass if you don't call George." How many companies could do that without a superior technical support team already in place, nationwide? Intergraph has 2,000 guys like this in the US alone.

The plain fact is that Intergraph is prime time and I wish to nominate them that attribute.

And I would venture to think, that at the moment, they are the only computer company in the video market that is. I should think you'd like to know more about them, so here is something to consider.

Although I would not rank Intergraph among the most video-savvy companies, it's birth lies in the highly Mission Critical arena of CAD-CAM engineering for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena, California. I first heard about Intergraph in 1987, when I was making marketing videos for a large nuclear power plant constructor. Here I was, selling myself as a "leading vendor" in computer animation and video, and the engineers in this company were cranking out 3-D textured walkthroughs of steam turbines in real time!

The Bosch FGS-4000 I was using could barely do solid geometry! My $45,000 Via Video could only put 16 colors on the screen at one time! Discreetly, I asked what their machines were. "Intergraphs," they said. Hmm.

"Could we videotape those signals on your screen?"

"Try it." they suggested. Nope. Scan lines all over.

"Can we take your RGB feed out, somehow and make it NTSC?"

"Nope. Need a black box. Ain't been invented yet." And that was it. I never heard about Intergraph again.

Well, folks, now they invented the black box. It's called WindowsNT and it's cheap and it works.
And suddenly, Intergraph is all over the video industry like worker bees in a bonnet of begonias.

"We decided to sit on the sidelines for awhile." explains Intergraph (TITLE) Mike Bare, "We helped pioneer Motion JPEG in 19 (DATE) and have been involved in computer animation since our inception in 19(DATE), so we had all we needed to satisfy the engineers of the world. But we knew the software was not yet there to take our expertise to the entertainment world with any level of success so we stayed out of the game until WindowsNT came along. Now that the applications are there, we here to say we've got the best hardware to hold it."

It seems only natural, doesn't it? Here was Integraph, the prime hardware choice of engineers - guys who keep nuclear reactors from cratering the suburbs. And now they're after us - the second most demanding sector of our society - the guys who make movies with scenes that have the suburbs getting cratered!

Years later, having followed the 3-D wave as it entered and swept through the video industry, I wondered what happened to that company, Intergraph, and why it never crossed the line from engineering into video. It seemed a natural. It was. They have.

At NAB '96, Intergraph hit the video market with a force that can only be supported by at least two of the three requisites for success in video manufacturing: Technical know-how, money and market savvy. Intergraph had the first two. Painfully, they are slowly acquiring the savvy.

As luck and fate would have it, an Intergraph landed in my studio quite by accident. I had decided to tool up my shop for high end 3-D animation production and the folks at Softimage suggested an Intergraph 400Z as a starter box. This dual Pentium box sported one of the first OpenGL video cards I had ever used, and it was instant love.

I had never seen a 3-D object respond instantly to my mouse before. I could mush the shaded object like a clay ball. I could apply a surface and see it wrap the colored texture around the shape instantly. I could add a light and see its reflection on the object move as I moved the light. So this is what those engineers were chuckling about when I walked through their quiet warrens of wonder years ago. I wanted to do more Intergraph.

I called for press evals and they let me have whatever I asked for. They wanted press. I wanted play. I took the bugger apart. It was built like only an American boy of the sixties could love, like a Chevy. I hooked it up to things to see how it would work. DPS, great. Sound cards. No problem. Nine gig Seagates. Fine. I sipped my Coke and dreamed I was in a McDonalds that sold 15-cent hamburgers and Dave Tharp was beside me with his bug-eyed Sprite.

If it wouldn't risk credibility a bit more, I'll tell you what happened with the client and his bloody Sunday deadline. We made it. With an hour to spare. And then the client had the audacity to ask me to dub four copies and let him use my 610 to write three letters to his clients. Yes. You would believe that, after all. You would, wouldn't you?

So what did it matter if a hard drive crashed and I ended up working 50 straight hours without sleep. It was a sunny Sunday morning and I missed the Northeaster that ripped the 70 foot maple tree out of my lawn and killed the neighborhood's phone service all weekend. Driving home at 70 miles per hour up the Deegan Expressway, I hallucinated. Everything around me was suddenly rock solid still. I kept my cool. I knew, deep inside, that everybody around me was moving very quickly, very safely up a highway of dreams.

BIO: George Avgerakis is sleeping it off on the fold out couch at Avekta Productions, a full service motion picture and animation production studio in New York City. When he wakes up he'll check the email at http://www.avekta.com and hope to find a note from Dave Tharp whom he hasn't seen since a road ralleye in 1967.